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As Gregor Samsa
Awoke to Less Red Tape ...

Belgian Lawmaker Evokes
Kafka in Trying to Cut Back
On Stifling Bureaucracy

By

John W. Miller Dow Jones Newswires

Updated May 17, 2004 11:59 p.m. ET

BRUSSELS -- From his paperless office, Vincent Van Quickenborne invokes the name of his hero, Franz Kafka, to describe the enormity of his task -- "slaying the bureaucratic monster."

"He was the first European to write about red tape," says the 30-year-old former Belgian legislator who was named Belgium's first secretary of state for administrative simplification last July.

In honor of the late German-Czech writer who hated irrational authority, Mr. Van Quickenborne promptly launched the Kafka Initiative. Belgians were asked to send examples of absurd rules. Now he's sorting through the 3,000 replies, looking for ways to untangle thickets of regulations that no longer make much sense.

Bureaucracy is a chronic European disease, visible in countless ways from the three months it takes to start a business in Italy to the half-dozen forms needed to change an address in France. Simplifying procedures and getting rid of redundant laws could increase productivity and thus boost overall gross domestic product in the European Union by 7%, according to calculations by Ireland's Ministry of Finance.

The surfeit of statutes and decrees dates from the paperwork-heavy social-engineering schemes sparked by the French Revolution two centuries ago. "The mentality in Europe is, if we could have the right rules and regulations, we could all be happy," says Alberto Alesina, chair of economics at Harvard University and the author of a study on bureaucracy in Europe.

Belgium has perhaps the continent's worst case of bureaucratitis. A multiethnic nation of 10 million, this 174-year-old country's solution to its diversity has been a complex and often-confusing division of power for different areas of life among 589 communes, some 50 cabinet-level ministers and seven separate governments that represent the national government; the French, Dutch and German language groups; and the Brussels, Flemish and Walloon regions.

The forces of deregulation and technology are beginning to attack the problem. In the past decade, European governments have begun using new technology to deliver previously complex and time-consuming services, like voter-registration forms, driver's-license applications and income-tax reports.

Politicians are promising to help. This year, finance ministers from Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the U.K., as the four countries that successively hold the EU's six-month revolving presidency, promised to cut red tape in the EU in 2004 and 2005. They declined to specify exactly how they would do that.

But how is it going in the bureaucratic trenches, where Mr. Van Quickenborne has been trying to snip away one dumb rule at a time?

Through the end of March, his office solicited calls, letters and e-mails with examples of needless Belgian rules. A web site, www.kafka.be, got 150,000 hits.

Now Mr. Van Quickenborne's staff of 17, well, bureaucrats, is evaluating the responses. Some typical complaints: To complete legal paperwork to get married, a bride-to-be needs stamped letters from authorities in three different cities -- Charleroi, where she was born; Brussels, where she married the first time, and Verviers, where she is tying the knot this time. An architect needs 18 months to process building permits for a house. A farmer spends an hour a day filling out paperwork so he can plant biological crops.

Mr. Van Quickenborne, who prides himself on an office free of shelves and files and likes to say "less paper, more pleasure," is counting on technology for part of the answer. He plans to please the bride, the architect and the farmer by setting up online databases that all government workers can access.

So far, he has had mixed success on broader changes to the system.

One triumph involved so-called conform copies. For two centuries, even before the Belgian state was born, official documents submitted to a local authority had to be accompanied by a conform copy -- another document stamped and approved by an individual's home commune, or local district. In 2003, communes issued 700,000 conform copies. "That's a lot of time taken off work" by Belgians who needed to visit commune offices to request and pick up extra paperwork, says Mr. Van Quickenborne.

The rule is a relic of 19th century record-keeping habits, developed to make sure handwritten copies were identical. An investigation by Mr. Van Quickenborne's staff showed that communes rarely verified the copies because most were photocopied, creating a potential for fraud. Cheaters, for example, could subtract a zero from the pay invoice turned in with their tax returns, lowering their taxes.

Mr. Van Quickenborne succeeded in getting local authorities to eliminate the rule starting April 1.

He's had less success with fiscal stamps. Belgium residents are required to pay administrative fees -- for a new passport, for example, or a change of address -- with fiscal stamps. The stamps are purchased at any post office and used to pay fees at local government offices, which in turn submit them to the federal government for cash. Napoleon wrote the rule because he didn't trust local administrations to handle money. Two centuries later, it still exists. Belgians buy &euro;125 million ($148.2 million) of fiscal stamps every year.

Mr. Van Quickenborne believes the system is inefficient and wants to authorize local authorities to take cash or electronic payment instead. But he's having a hard time convincing other Belgium officials.

"In today's unsafe world, people don't like to handle cash," argues Claude Monseu, general auditor for customs and taxes and a civil servant in Belgian government for 29 years. "And we can't expect every small government office to have an electronic-payment machine. But I support the notion of simplifying procedure, when possible."

He hopes to start a parallel payment scheme, with invoices, by the start of 2006. "It's too radical to get rid of them right away," he says. "So hopefully, they'll just fade away because of other payment systems."

Mr. Van Quickenborne has his skeptics. "We've been waiting for simplification for 50 years," says Roger Mene, president of the Union of Middle Classes, which represents 13,000 small-business owners in Belgium. "The more people talk about it, the less gets done."

Pierre-Yves Lambert, a political essayist for French-language daily La Libre Belgique, predicts that Belgium's simplification czar won't get very far "because changing rules at the local level is really not the competency of the federal government."

But Mr. Van Quickenborne, who stirred controversy as a Belgium senator in his mid 20s by proposing to scrap the royal family's allowances and threatening to smoke a joint while arguing to legalize marijuana, remains optimistic even if his hero, Mr. Kafka, was anything but.

He recalls his favorite Kafka story, "Before the Law," about a man who aspires to visit a building called the Law. A doorkeeper blocks his entrance. By the time the story ends, the man has grown old and is dying -- and still hasn't gotten in.

That won't be his, or Europe's, fate, Mr. Van Quickenborne vows. Rather, he hopes to be booted out of his building. "Ideally," he says, "if I do my job right, they'll get rid of me."